Paret y Alcázar, Luis

Madrid, 1746 - Madrid, 1799

Charles III dining before the Court

Ca. 1775. Oil on panel

In this painting, Paret invites us to attend a daily ritual at the Royal Palace in Madrid. Spain’s King Charles III (1716-1788) sits at the table in presence of his ministers, ambassadors, servants and his favorite hunting dogs. Paret captures the moment when he is about to drink from a goblet offered by a servant on bended knee. The walls are sumptuously decorated with striking tapestries whose mythological subjects have been identified from left to right as: The Sacrifice of Iphigenia, Mercury and Herse, Diana with a Hunting Dog and Venus in Vulcan’s Forge. These scenes may have been chosen to reflect the ceremony taking place in front of them, or as allusions to the king’s intimate thoughts. They touch on subjects such as patriotism, embodied by Iphigenia’s sacrifice, which legitimized her father Agamemnon’s attack on Troy; love, suggested by Mercury and Herse’s shared passion; hunting, in the form of its tutelary goddess, Diana; and military honor, reflected by the armor that Vulcan made for Venus’s son, Aeneas, future conqueror of Rome. The Baroque fresco on the ceiling shows two river gods among clouds that appear to be raining on the room.

Depictions of a royal person at table are infrequent, but at the court of Charles III, the king’s lunch followed a strict ceremony described by numerous foreign visitors of his time. Paret must have known those rooms well as a painter in the employ of the king’s younger brother, the infante don Luis. The hall that appears here has much the same layout as it does today. Sources indicate that when this work was painted the antechamber was decorated with tapestries on the life of Joseph, rather than mythological scenes. The ceiling painted by Raphael Mengs depicted The Apotheosis of Hercules, while the image in Paret’s painting more closely resembles a free imitation of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s ceiling for the throne room. Rather than reflecting the scene with exactitude, Paret seems to have added a subtle touch of humor (Text drawn from Bray, X. in: Enciclopedia del Museo del Prado, Fundación Amigos del Museo del Prado, 2006, pp. 635-637).